The groundnut pyramids of Kano were a sight to behold and told a wonderful story of agricultural sufficiency and of a fruitful nation. It revealed a country that knew the way to sustainable development, through agriculture, self sustainability and hard work.

Over the years Nigeria has gone away from farming as we started to over rely on oil, a resource with a finite life shelf. The land of Nigeria is blessed, sow a seed and it will surely grow. We have the potential to be the food basket of all of Africa. When we produce our own food as we used to do in the past to a larger degree than we do today we can rest assured that no matter the global economic outlook, inflation would always be under control because we would have more than enough internally generated food to feed the population. As our imports grew and grew so did inflation.

It is appropriate to look back and remember the things that made us great back then and agriculture was certainly one of them. As the picture shows, the groundnut industry alone provided employment of many youths, youths today are easily enticed into militancy because of the lack of jobs yet we have resources to create thousands of jobs off the God given fertile land we sit on.

They were viewed as both a tourist attraction and a symbol of wealth. In the 1960s and 70s, as production in Nigeria shifted from agriculture to oil, the groundnut pyramids disappeared.

I am reflecting on the Groundnut Pyramids of Kano and I’m wondering; would we be able to recreate something like this again?